The digital media industry has evolved greatly within the past several years, with consumers (users) now generally able to access large amounts of media content, for example music or videos, at any location or time of day, using a wide variety of computing systems, handheld entertainment devices, smartphones, or other types of media device.
Digital media content can be delivered to users by different means. For example, a user can download various media items, such as individual songs or movies, to a particular device, for later offline playback at that device. Alternatively, a user can listen to, or view, streams of media content provided as channels that are being broadcast in realtime to multiple devices, in a manner similar to broadcast radio and television, or cable television.
Advances in computer network technology have increased the speed and reliability with which media content can be transmitted over networks to individual media devices. This has made it possible for a user to be able to select particular media items to be played over a network in an on-demand fashion, rather than requiring the user to tune to a particular channel to receive a predefined broadcast transmission.
Features that enhance the user's ability to switch between different items of media, for example between different media channels, are important aspects of the overall user experience, since any inconvenience may cause the user to be less-inclined to switch between the different items or channels, thereby reducing the user's enjoyment, and also inhibiting the distribution of media content, and related content such as advertisements.
To address this, media content associated with multiple channels or streams of media can be buffered, to better support channel selection and viewing by the user.
However, despite advances in computer networking, some types of media content, such as high-resolution video content, comprise large amounts of data that may ultimately need to be delivered to the playing device. These are generally the types of environments in which embodiments of the invention can be used.